Valued by skill
What Family Caregiving Is Worth in Your State
Family caregivers coordinate care across medical, legal, financial and home systems. That is skilled work, and we value it that way: $55 an hour, the rate for a care systems integrator. Nationally, family caregivers bring skill worth $2.8 trillion a year. Choose your state to see what that skill is worth where you live, then share your number and send it to your legislators.
Family caregivers in bring skill worth
a year to their state.
- family caregivers
- hours of care a year
- $55 an hourthe rate for a care systems integrator
The skill behind the number
- Advocating
- Assessing
- Being
- Communicating
- Deciding
- Managing
- Planning
- Providing
- Sustaining
The Nine Caregiving Domains™ family caregivers work across, every day.
Share Your State’s Number
Download a card with your state’s number, sized for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Send Your Number to Your Legislators
We’ve filled in your state’s numbers. Now add your own: your hours of care a week, your years of caregiving, and what your caregiving is worth. Your own numbers are what make a legislator stop and read.
Don’t have them yet? Our calculator gives you your annual and lifetime value in a few minutes. It opens in a new tab, so your note stays here.
Then fill in the brackets, add your legislator’s name, and copy the note into an email or your legislator’s contact form.
How we calculated this. Each state’s number of family caregivers of adults and their hours of care come from the AARP Public Policy Institute’s Valuing the Invaluable 2026 (Table A1, 2024 data). We value every hour at $55. The national figure adds the home medical care parents provide children with complex medical needs (Romley et al., Pediatrics, 2016): 50.99 billion hours in all, worth $2.8 trillion a year. Those children’s hours aren’t measured state by state, so each state’s number is a floor.
Why $55. It’s the rate for a care systems integrator, the coordinating work family caregivers do most. It sits below the national median wage for medical and health services managers, $59.55 an hour (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025). The hours counted include the small share of family caregivers who are paid for some or all of their care.
What is your own caregiving worth? Use our Non-Reimbursed Family Caregiver Savings Calculator.
